Quiz study guides

Author

Katie Schuler

Published

September 17, 2023

You will receive a single score (0-4, see rubric) for each topic area representing your understanding of the course material in that area. A great way to study for quizzes in general is to (1) study the lecture notes and (2) quiz yourself with the labs.

1 Quiz 1

Quiz 1 will test the following learning objectives, divided into 6 topic areas. For each topic area, you should be able to do the list that follows. You can think of this as a studying checklist!

  1. R Basics: general
    • Assign an object to a valid variable name, list all variables in the environment and remove them
    • Use packages and differentiate between installing and loading
    • Get help with a function or package from R
    • Return information about an object, including its structure, data type, length, and attributes
    • Explain what functions and control flow are; differentiate between types of control flow
  2. R Basics: vectors, operations, and subsetting
    • Distinguish between an atomic vector and a list
    • Create atomic vectors and determine their data types
    • Differentiate between implicit and explicit coercion and coerce an object to another type
    • Use arithmetic, comparison, and logical operators on vectors
    • Explain how more complex data structures are built from atomic vectors and create them
    • Distinguish between NA and NULL
    • Subset vectors and higher dimensional objects with the [, [[ and $ operators
  3. Data importing
    • Load the tidyverse, recognize the included packages, and critique code for redundant loading
    • Construct a tidy dataset and critique whether a given dataset is tidy
    • Use the map function from the purr package
    • Create a tibble and distinguish between a tibble and a data frame
    • Use readr to read delimited files and determine whether readr can read files of a given type
    • Use col_types to add a column specifications and explain how readr guesses without it
    • Solve the 3 most common importing problems we discussed in class
  4. Data visualization: basics
    • Describe how to create a plot with ggplot2 including the 3 basic requirements
    • Distinguish between mapping and setting aesthetics
    • Describe how ggplot2 maps categorical variables to aesthetics and interpret the 3 common warnings people encounter in this process
    • Interpret ggplot() calls with explicit or implicit arguments for data and mapping
    • Recognize the geoms we discussed in class and select which to use for a given situation
    • Differentiate between globally and locally defined mappings and recognize them in given plot (or code)
  5. Data visualization: layers
    • Use the position argument to modify the position of the geoms in geom_bar() or geom_point()
    • Describe stat="identity" and describe the default transformations for geom_bar(), geom_histogram(), and geom_smooth()
    • Set the smoothing method for geom_smooth() and the bins or bindwidth for geom_histogram()
    • Facet a plot with facet_wrap() and facet_grid()
    • Modify axis, legend, and plot labels with labs()
    • Apply a given theme to a plot and adjust the base font size or family.
    • Describe scales and recognize the outcome of adding a scale layer
  6. Data wrangling
    • Describe the common structure of dplyr functions (aka verbs)
    • Combine dplyr functions with the pipe operator to solve complex problems
    • Manipulate rows with filter(), arrange(), and distinct()
    • Maniuplate columns with mutate(), select(), and rename()
    • Group and summarise data with group_by(), summarise(), and ungroup()
    • Evaulate dplyr functions that include the common arguments we covered in class

2 Quiz 2

Quiz 2 will test the following learning objectives, divided into 4 topic areas. For each topic area, you should be able to do the list that follows. You can think of this as a studying checklist!

More learning objectives will be added as we cover these topics in lecture.

  1. Sampling distribution

    • Explore a simple dataset with a histogram and summary statistics
    • Recognize uniform and Gaussian probability distributions in a plot or equation and use R’s functions d*(), p*(), and r*() to work with these distributions
    • Explain the difference between the parameter and the paramter estimate
    • Construct the sampling distribution of a paramater estimate with infer and quantify the spread of the distribution with a confidence interval.

  2. Hypothesis testing

  3. Model specification

    • Classify a model as supervised or unsupervised, regression or classification, and linear or nonlinear
    • Recognize the 4 ways of writing the linear model equation

  4. Model fitting

    • Estimate the free parameters of a linear model with the gradient descent approach
    • Estimate the free parameters of a linear model with the OLS approach